Brenda Winter noticed the little things first. Her husband John, normally a quiet and reserved man, would start getting angry inexplicably while driving. “He was so laid back, and he just stopped coping with normal, daily events,” Brenda explains from Canberra.
Brenda and John met in the mid-60s, when John took a holiday to the UK after serving in Vietnam. They fell in love, and she adopted her husband’s homeland, where they married and raised two daughters.
“He was a woodworker, just as a hobby, but when he was asked to make a set of shelves for one of our daughter’s – he couldn’t do it. It was a simple task for him – but the shelves were riddled with basic errors.
“He was frustrated with his behaviour, as was I… we didn’t know what was wrong or why he was changing so rapidly.”
At 61-years-old, John Winter was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and Brenda’s role as wife shifted to one of carer for her husband.
“He never really accepted his diagnosis – he never read any information on the disease, and never wanted to talk about it,” Brenda says, her voice trembling with emotion.
John’s dementia advanced rapidly – and he started going missing at regular intervals.
“We would be out shopping together, and I would ask him to wait on a bench for me, but he would just wander off,” Brenda explains. “In 2012, I took him back to the UK, effectively to say goodbye to our friends there … and he went missing when I took him to an exhibition in London. I always managed to find him, but it was awful every time”.
The most fraught occasion came in late September 2012, while Brenda and her daughter went to her local gym.
“I work out every morning, and as was the case on this morning, I left John in bed at home. My daughter and I had a coffee together after our work out, meaning we came back home slightly later … and when we did, John wasn’t there.
“We called the police, and what followed was four agonising hours, as they scoured the neighbourhood for him.”
At this stage of John’s life, his dementia had left him with no road sense, meaning he no longer understood how to cross a road safely – or what risk traffic posed to him as a pedestrian.
“Thankfully a community bus driver saw John and recognised him, and she was able to pick him up and bring him home,” Brenda says, adding, “he was miles and miles from home – we have no idea how he got where he was … or how he managed to avoid the traffic.”
Rebecca Kotz, from the AFP National Missing Persons Coordination Centre says John’s return is an unusually lucky ending, “There is not a high return rate with dementia sufferers – they wander, very confused and not many return to their homes.”
For Brenda Winter, John’s condition has led him into fulltime care, as he began getting increasingly aggressive to the love of his life.
“He became more and more withdrawn, and his condition has caused him to stop speaking or walking without assistance. I visit him every day in his home, but there’s only a flicker of recognition now,” Brenda pauses.
“What people don’t realise is how wide the impact of this disease is – not only have I lost my husband, our daughters’ have lost their father and our grandchildren will never know their granddad.
“I feel blessed to have had 40 happy years with him.”
Missing Persons Week runs from August 3-9 in conjunction with Alzheimer’s Australia. For more information, visit the AFP’s Missing Persons website.
